ENGL 847 Maher: How to avoid it

Three ways to avoid plagiarizing

Plagiarism is the act of using someone else's work or words and presenting them as your own. Plagiarism is considered the foremost academic sin and can result in a student being expelled (see Academic Integrity and Student Conduct Code). Instructors now use tools like Turnitin.com to check for plagiarism.

The illustration on the right outlines how to avoid plagiarism by using three different ways of crediting your source:

quotation marks

block quotes

paraphrasing.

Below are examples of quotation marks, block quotes, and paraphrasing.

Quotation marks

Placing quotation marks around words that are not yours lets the reader know where your words end and another's begin.

Rob's mother "began attending night school to become a qualified kitchen supervisor" in order to earn enough money to send her son to private school.

Block quotes

Used for quotes of four or more lines, block quotes are indented without quotation marks.

Jeff Hobbs outlined Jackie Peace's belief that her son would do well thusly:

Her faith in her son's promise began with his intense interest in books, a passion that could not be taught.... These books were gateways, not just in abstractions of the mind but in real-world opportunities.

Paraphrasing

Including someone else's thoughts or ideas in your own wording gives credit to the author:

Jackie Peace sacrificed time with her son in order to complete training for a higher paying job so she could enroll her son in private school, the author writes. She felt her trust was well-placed because of her son's love of books.¹

¹ Hobbs, J. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League. New York: Scribner, 2014.

Tools to help you avoid plagiarizing

Below are plagiarism checkers and websites to help you learn how to become a better writer.

This free site allows users to detect plagiarism in any document or file that is copy-pasted or uploaded. Within a few seconds, the site generates a report dissecting each sentence and displaying all of the source websites from where the content was copied. The site places limits on word counts and number of times per day a user can run a search.

Academic Integrity at Cañada College

Read Cañada College's policies on plagiarism and cheating on this page and learn how instructors check for copied work and how the college handles students found guilty of submitting work not their own.